


Lost and Found

by MiraMira



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Moving, Post-Canon, Temptation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 16:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12369891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraMira/pseuds/MiraMira
Summary: Pepper grows up, but she never stops fighting.





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afinch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afinch/gifts).



> Happy Halloween, afinch! I had a tough time figuring out what direction to take this, but your prompts were a huge help. I hope this works for you.

“Do you really have to go, Pep?” Brian asks again.

Pepper shrugs, forcing a lightness into her voice she doesn’t feel. “Dad’s taken the job, house’s been sold...What am I s’posed to do? Live here in the quarry?”

“You could!”

She can’t say she hasn’t thought about it, which is also how she’s able to answer so quickly. “Someone’d come looking. Sooner or later, they always do.” Unable to stand the way his face falls in response, she violates the unspoken no-contact rule and administers a headlock until he’s too busy squirming and cursing for anything else.

Wensleydale intervenes, extending a handshake she accepts with equal solemnity. “’s been an honor and a privilege, Pepper.”

She smirks. “Got that out of your comic, did you?”

“Yeah,” he admits. “Doesn’t make it less true.”

Adam comes last, of course. Pepper steels herself. This goodbye is the one that will make it real. If she’s not ready for it, she might do some unforgivably soppy thing like cry. She doesn’t know that she’ll ever be ready. 

“Do you have to go?” he repeats quietly, and Pepper wants to scream instead. Do they think she’d be putting herself through this, if she had a choice? 

Then she realizes that’s exactly what he’s offering her, and her breath catches.

“No,” she tells him at last, remembering the terrible moment the last time he considered bending his will, and almost left them not the Them - or anything else worth being. _You stay good_ , she wants to say, except that “good” isn’t Adam, and thank goodness for that. “You stay you.”

“You, too,” he says. But his eyes are sad, and old, and something else so incongruous with their indomitable leader, it isn’t until her parents’ car is packed and speeding down the highway that she recognizes it as fear.

A much longer time passes before she understands why.

-

School is hell1. Neither backtalk nor ignoring the speaker have persuaded the teachers to stop calling her by the name on her official records, which emboldens the students no matter how many kicks and punches she doles out in response. The boys think she’s weird and refuse to acknowledge her overtures of friendship, and the girls think she’s weird for pursuing the boys’ company beyond a single, silly crush. Not that she really wants to be friends with any of this pathetic lot. They aren’t the Them, and never will be.

She spends her study periods struggling to compose letters to Lower Tadfield that don’t consist entirely of whinging. The Them wouldn’t whinge. They’d fight, and that’s what she intends to keep doing.

Most nights, she lies awake long after being sent to bed since she won’t do her homework, listening to the muffled sounds of her parents yelling. The arguments drift from what to do about her, to her father’s difficulties at work, her mother’s boredom, money troubles, and other things she definitely shouldn’t be hearing.

 _Good,_ she thinks. They brought this upon themselves, bringing her to this place. Let them suffer. Let them all suffer.

-

Pepper grows up. From her parents’ perspective - especially her mother, who only sees her on weekends now - she settles down. Her grades are acceptable, her relationships with her classmates outwardly amiable, and her teachers no longer turn into sobbing, twitching balls of hysteria at the mention of her name. All seems as it should be.

She hasn’t stopped fighting, though. Her tactics have just grown subtler. When Mary Childermass calls her “that ginger slag,” she corners Mary’s boyfriend Jimmy to talk rugby scores every chance she gets until their relationship collapses, and snogs Mary’s best friend Lucy a few times for good measure. When Coach Peters promotes Jennifer van Horne to starting wing attack on the netball team, even though Pepper’s top scorer in practice and Jenny typically requires multiple reminders which goal is which, she’s the anonymous source who alerts Mrs. Peters about the “one-on-one sessions” responsible for that decision. And when Derek McGuirk wrecks her bike while trying to steal it, she follows him home after school and gives him a sound thrashing in front of all his put-upon younger siblings and their friends2.

She still asks herself, occasionally, whether she’s doing what the Them would do. Even more rarely, she thinks about writing or picking up the phone to ask. But the answers she does remember seem less and less applicable, and she can’t bear the thought that new ones might disappoint. Or worse, never arrive. 

Eventually, she stops wondering.

-

“So how’s Lower Tadfield?” asks the woman darkening the already dreary entryway of Pepper’s basement cubicle.

Pepper blinks, as much at the oddity of anyone other than her supervisor and support staff venturing down to what passes for the Gazette’s IT department as the question itself. She may have gotten a bit chatty after one too many drinks at the happy hour to welcome her and the other interns, but she doesn’t remember bringing up her childhood. And she can’t think of any other time she might have spoken with this woman, whose name she’s struggling to recall. Camilla? Cecilia? Something with a C, at any rate. Or is it an S?

“Dunno,” she says, once she’s made all the progress on processing the inquiry she thinks she’s going to make. “Haven’t been there in ages.”

“Pity.” The woman advances into the room, running a hand along the edge of Pepper’s desk. “And Adam Young? Do you still keep in touch with him?”

She feels a fight-or-flight response kick in, from her tensed shoulders to her rapidly beating heart. If she’d mentioned Adam, let alone in any way that set him apart from the rest of the Them, _that_ would’ve stuck. “I don’t see that’s any of your business,” she grinds out through gritted teeth.

The woman chuckles: a sharp, rapid burst of machine-gun fire. In the dim light of the basement, her rich auburn hair is the color of blood. “Oh, Adam is very much my business. As are you.” She leans forward. “Or have you forgotten our duel?”

There is a sudden, loud ringing in Pepper’s ears, metal on metal. She doesn’t know whether she’d let the memory slip away, or simply set it aside in a safe corner of her subconscious where it couldn’t crowd out every other piece of knowledge.

“Come for a rematch?” she hears herself say.

War’s laughter becomes the rumble of aftershocks from an explosion. She reaches out and touches Pepper’s chin with a finger, marking her as the nail digs into her flesh. “When you’re ready to begin your _real_ internship, let me know.”

With that, she withdraws and slips silently away, leaving Pepper trembling with...rage? Fear? Excitement? Her inability to tell scares her more than anything else. At least until she catches sight of her reflection in her computer monitor, and recoils from its alien expression.

“Oi! Galadriel!” Tim the admin has taken her previous visitor’s place across the desk, and is brandishing something brown and lumpy at her. Under different circumstances, she would take this opportunity to clarify that embarrassing happy hour confessions stay dead and buried unless he wants to join them, but at the moment she’s more grateful for the distraction than anything else. “Package for you. Almost didn’t make it past security.”

He slides it over to her and waits expectantly. She stares back until he gives up and leaves, then waits a few seconds more before tearing it open.

At first, she doesn’t know what she’s seeing. As she’s about to curse whatever powers are currently driving events for deciding normal will not be an option for her today, the incidents fuse together in her mind, and she gasps: half in recognition; half in amazement that it’s survived the trip, never mind the intervening decade since she last laid eyes on it. The string holding the two bits of wood together is literally hanging on by a thread, and the wood itself is wearing at the edges. Still, as she grips the “hilt” carefully and holds it aloft, it feels more right in her hand than the finest steel ever could.

She doesn’t need the note, but her heart still gives a leap at the handwriting, which has retained much of its old childish scrawl: 

_Thought you could use this._

_\- A._

_P.S. The others say hello. Come and visit us some time, yeah?_

Pepper smiles: her own, safe, familiar smile. “Yeah,” she says.

 

Notes:

1 Not quite, though the principal does go on to write a book on management that gains a modest following among some of the lower echelons.

2 Sometimes the old methods still work best.


End file.
